15. What did Thomson, Watson & Co. Purchase?
The Emancipation of the Enslaved at the Cape
It rained on the first day of December in 1838. This was a day to remember. Across the Cape Colony, the yoke of forced labour had been lifted from the almost 40,000 inhabitants who had formerly been classified as slaves. They were now free.
It had been a long road to freedom. When the Dutch first settled the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century the Atlantic slave trade was expanding. As we discussed in Chapter 12, hundreds of thousands of Africans were being shipped across the Atlantic by Portuguese, British, French and Dutch traders and sold to settlers in the New World. Because of the profitability of the trade, the rivalry between these slave-trading nations was intense. It would be this rivalry that would bring the first shipment of Angolan slaves to the Cape.
On 23 January 1658 the Dutch ship Amersfoort sighted a Portuguese slaver off the coast of Angola with about 500 slaves on board.1 After a twenty-four-hour chase the ship was captured and about 250 people were taken to the Cape. When the ship anchored in Table Bay two months later, only 174 of those slaves were still alive. One of those who survived was a young boy given the name of Anthonij.
At the Cape, Anthonij of Angola was sold to Nathaniel West and then, a few months later, to Christiaan Jansz. Anthonij would move from one owner to the next until, sometime in the late 1670s, he gained his freedom. Just how this happened is not clear, but by 1680 he was concluding contracts as a free man and by 1683 he had bought a farm with his business partner (and former slave), Manuel of Angola. The farm, which he appropriately called Angola, was situated in the beautiful Jonkershoek valley, probably close to the present-day luxury wine farm of Lanzerac in Stellenbosch. One year later Anthonij would acquire his own slave, Sijmon Ham. When Anthonij died in 1696, Susanna of Mombasa, his common-law wife (they could not legally marry because of her slave status), and her two children were manumitted.
Anthonij’s story provides a glimpse into the complex lives of slaves during the early years of the Cape Colony. Like Anthonij, some earned their freedom and became part of settler society. Angela of Bengale, a slave from India, married the settler Arnoldus Basson and would become a wealthy widow who lived until the age of seventy. Her daughter, Anna de Koning, who arrived with her mother as a slave girl, married Olof Bergh, a rich Swedish settler, and became the mistress of one of the most prosperous farms at the Cape, Groot Constantia.2 Not only did de Koning and Bergh have twelve children, but at the time of her death, in 1734, she owned twenty-seven slaves, one of whom came from Bengal, in India, the same place where she had been born.
But the stories of Anthonij and Angela were exceptions. For most of those captured and sold as slaves, life was miserable. As their names indicate, they came from far-flung places – between 1652 and 1808 about 63,000 slaves were taken to the Cape from Indonesia (23 per cent), India (26 per cent), Madagascar (25 per cent) and the African east coast, mostly Mozambique (26 per cent).3 The company retained many of them to work on its own fortifications and in its trading activities. By 1770 the Slave Lodge in Cape Town – today the Iziko Slave Museum – housed more than a thousand slaves. At the Cape, in contrast to other parts of the world, slavery was thus, at least initially, an urban phenomenon.4 The lives of those in the lodge were probably better than those on the farms. Company slaves were fed and clothed, all were baptised and many, on reaching their twenty-fifth birthdays, were manumitted. There was even a slave school; we know of letters that were sent from formerly enslaved men to their friends in the lodge. But despite these concessions, slavery was still a system of unfreedom and exploitation. Slaves would be punished for any misdemeanour in the most horrifying ways. Their many attempts to escape, few of which were successful, suggest that slave life, even in the lodge, was bleak.
Most slaves who arrived in Cape Town were sold to farmers. They were an important source of labour. The company had banned the enslavement of Khoesan. This was probably more a strategic than a moral choice: Khoesan men and women could escape easily in the countryside, which made their supervision costly. And because they were important trading partners with the Dutch, it was important to keep relations between them amiable. The trouble was that few free men were willing to work as wage labourers while there was ample land available to farm. In fact, when in 1717 a commission of inquiry was set up to investigate whether slaves should be the primary source of farm labour or if the immigration of free labourers from Europe should be encouraged, six of the seven commissioners agreed that slave labour was preferable. Their reason was simple: slaves could be more easily coerced than free labourers. The commissioners argued that if European immigration were to be encouraged, the new arrivals would not wish to work on the farms of other settlers but would rather want farms of their own. The only way to ensure enough workers for the wheat and especially the wine farms was to obtain a steady supply of slave labour. Their argument would mirror the hypothesis of two scholars, H. J. Nieboer and Evsey Domar, two centuries later: that when land is abundant and labour in short supply, the only way to ensure a reliable source of labour is to coerce someone. Slavery is the extreme form of labour coercion.5 In fact, we have already discussed a version of the Nieboer–Domar hypothesis in Chapter 8, relating it to Africa’s high land–labour ratio and endemic slavery.6
Until recently, the labour that slaves performed was seen by historians as their main economic contribution – and the reason that slaves, for much of the eighteenth century, outnumbered settlers at the Cape. But new research reveals that slaves also inadvertently contributed to the economy by being an important store of value: in the parlance of the time, slaves were property that belonged to an owner.7 Owners could sell their ‘property’ to someone else, but they could also use it as collateral on a mortgage. In a setting where there were no formal banks, slave capital, rather than land (which is not a very liquid asset), was used to lubricate a dense informal financial network between settlers.
This provides an additional clue as to why such an abhorrent institution was so pervasive at the Cape and why it survived for so long. Slave owners may have justified their actions in racist language, but their motives were economic. Even after Britain took control of the Cape in 1806 and abolished the slave trade in 1807, the practice continued. In fact, the end of the slave trade brought greater coercion against the Khoesan – again, a predictable consequence when land is freely available and in the absence of representative institutions.
But the global economy was changing at that time. As we will discuss in Chapter 17, England was then at the start of its Industrial Revolution. New ideologies, such as free trade, were rapidly gaining ascendancy in the British parliament, reflecting the interests of the new business elite rather than the landed gentry. People like William Wilberforce led moral campaigns against the injustices of slavery. The end of slavery in the British Empire drew near.
Yet it took until 1833 before the Slave Emancipation Act was finally signed, and only after a negotiated settlement. In what seems remarkably unjust to us today, it was agreed that slave owners across the British Empire would be compensated for the loss of their ‘property’. The compensation would consist of indentureship – another four to six years of uncompensated labour for the former masters – and cash. The total cash amount paid to slaveholders was £20 million, or 40 per cent of the British budget. Britain had to borrow the money; and British taxpayers finally repaid all the instalments on its loans only in 2015!
At the Cape, commissioners went round to all farms to ‘value’ each of the almost 39,000 slaves.8 The total amount exceeded £3 million, but the Cape was allocated only £1,247,401 by the British government. On top of this, slave owners had to go to London to claim the money, a long and expensive trip. This is where entrepreneurial British merchants like John Thomson and Harrison Watson stepped in. Thomson, Watson & Company and a few other merchant companies began to buy up slave owners’ compensation claims.9 They then sent them to their agents in London and took a percentage of the returns. These companies would, by the end of the emancipation process, invest their profits in the new colonial banks and insurance companies, a shift away from the informal capital markets of the countryside towards a more formalised commercial capitalism.
In the US South, slavery would only end three decades after slaves had been emancipated in the British Empire. It took a brutal civil war to do so.10 Using an innovative methodology, economic historians Richard Hornbeck and Trevon Logan calculate that the aggregate productivity gains of emancipating enslaved Americans were up to 35 per cent of US GDP, the equivalent of 60 years of technological progress.11 Although emancipation decreased output in the short run, they argue that ‘it sparked dramatic aggregate economic gains by decreasing costs substantially more, illustrating the substantial potential for aggregate economic gains in the presence of severe misallocation’.12
Despite these large economic gains, emancipation was not welcomed by the former slaveholders, even those who received compensation. At the Cape, most slaveholders received a fraction of what they expected to receive and considered the entire process a major injustice. Because slaves were frequently used as collateral, many slaveholders defaulted on their loans and faced bankruptcy. In fact, for some the loss was so severe that it affected their living standards; in a paper with Igor Martins and Jeanne Cilliers, I show a greater loss of slave wealth actually shortened the lifespans of the older generation of slaveholders and probably also the likelihood that their kids would survive infancy.13 Disgusted at what they considered an injustice, as we will see in Chapter 16, some of them chose to move deeper into the South African interior.
And what of the former Cape slaves? Despite almost two centuries of enslavement, they received no compensation or any other form of support.14 After that rainy day on 1 December 1838, when freedom finally came, many moved to Cape Town to build new lives as masons or carpenters or seamstresses.15 Others moved to the mission stations that dotted the countryside where they could gain perhaps small plots of land to farm for themselves. And others stayed on the farms of their former masters, having to negotiate a new wage dispensation. The freedom from coercion was a first, if tentative, step in their long walk to economic freedom.
This section relies on research by Delia Robertson’s First Fifty Years project, www.e-family.co.za/ffy/g8/p8919.htm (accessed 1 May 2024).↩︎
A century later Constantia sweet wine would be sought after across the world, most famously by Napoleon after he was exiled on the Atlantic island of St Helena.↩︎
R. C. H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Hanover, NH, and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 40.↩︎
Erik Green, Creating the Cape Colony, Bloomsbury, 2022.↩︎
E. Green, The economics of slavery in the eighteenth-century Cape Colony: Revising the Nieboer–Domar hypothesis, International Review of Social History, 59 (1), 2014, 39–70.↩︎
The observant reader would notice another reason for their opposition to greater numbers of European immigrants at the Cape: in Chapter 10 we discussed the implications of the Engerman–Sokoloff hypothesis. In a highly unequal society the elite would want to protect their privileges, and one way of doing so is to limit immigration.↩︎
Fourie, Johan, and Christie Swanepoel. "‘Impending ruin’ or ‘remarkable wealth’? The role of private credit markets in the 18th-century Cape Colony." Journal of Southern African Studies 44, no. 1 (2018): 7-25.↩︎
Ekama, Kate, Johan Fourie, Hans Heese, and Lisa-Cheree Martin. "When cape slavery ended: introducing a new slave emancipation dataset." Explorations in Economic History 81 (2021): 101390.↩︎
Ekama, Kate. "Bondsmen: Slave Collateral in the 19th-Century Cape Colony." Journal of Southern African Studies 47, no. 3 (2021): 437-453.↩︎
It would be another two decades – only in 1888 – before slavery would finally be abolished in Brazil, the largest destination for Africans shipped during the Atlantic slave trade.↩︎
Hornbeck, Richard, and Trevon Logan. One Giant Leap: Emancipation and Aggregate Economic Gains. No. w31758. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2023.↩︎
Ibid., p. 1.↩︎
Martins, Igor, Jeanne Cilliers, and Johan Fourie. "Legacies of loss: The health outcomes of slaveholder compensation in the British Cape Colony." Explorations in Economic History 89 (2023): 101506.↩︎
Compensation of the slave owners rather than the enslaved was the general rule during all emancipations. There are few exceptions. In Jaffna, Sri Lanka, mothers received a small amount for each child manumitted. See N. Wickramasinghe, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).↩︎
Ross, Robert, and Lisa-Cheree Martin. "Accommodation and Resistance: The Housing of Cape Town’s Enslaved and Freed Population Before and After Emancipation." Journal of Southern African Studies 47, no. 3 (2021): 417-435.↩︎